Embodiments of the invention relate in general to the field of beamforming and methods for managing beamformed signals.
Modern large-scale radio telescope arrays use antenna stations composed of multiple antennas that are placed closely for imaging the sky. The signals received by the antennas at a station are typically combined by beamforming to reduce the amount of data to be processed in later stages. The signals sent out from the stations are then correlated to obtain visibilities, which correspond to samples of a Fourier transform of the sky image. The goal is then to reconstruct the sky image from the visibility measurements. Currently, beamforming at antenna stations is typically done by conjugate matched beamforming towards the center of the field of view at all antenna stations. Because the beam-shapes created at the stations are essentially the same and any differences are only due to the rotation of the stations with respect to each other, the information received by the antenna stations is merely coded in the phase of the signal because all of the stations scale the signal coming from a particular direction equally.